


A Place to Call My Own

by SegaBarrett



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: M/M, Torture, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-21
Updated: 2014-07-21
Packaged: 2018-02-09 21:33:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1998612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lindsey is captured by Angelus; but he may be in for a lesson he didn't expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Place to Call My Own

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Taste_of_Suburbia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taste_of_Suburbia/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Angel, and I make no money from this.

Lindsey MacDonald had promised himself once that he would never spend another day being poor. He had been caked in dirt at the time, trying desperately to get his family’s furnace working again so that all of them wouldn’t freeze to death.

They hadn’t grown up in LA, after all – they wouldn’t have been able to afford a shoebox in LA. Instead, they had lived on a dismal little street in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma, in a town that time seemed to have forgotten.

His house was up a hill. He’d thought about jumping off of it more than once. It had reeked of oil all day, every day, to where, looking back, he wondered how he hadn’t just gotten used to it, adapted, habituated.

It must have been his ambition. That very thing that wouldn’t let him turn into the rest of them.

He had had a little-sister, Katie, who had never wanted to escape. When they would talk at night in the room they shared (as there were only two in the tiny rambshackle place), he would dream big, talk about getting out, while she had talked about getting enough money to make some repairs. She wanted to meet a nice local guy, settle down, and have a couple of kids.

They’d never agreed.

Then there had been the day that Katie had taken some under-the-table job to try and make ends meet – Lindsey never found out the details – and had ended up in a coma, needing health care they couldn’t afford; hell, even if they could have afforded it, Lindsey doubted it would have done any good. She just laid there and stared, eyes open like she wasn’t sleeping, couldn’t sleep.

One day he had turned around and left. He had taken nothing; after all, he had nothing to take.

***

He was sitting at his desk at Wolfram and Hart, thinking of how he had gotten here. He tried to never think back, or to look back – there was nothing to see back there except for desolation, after all.

But this place was closing in on him, little by little, and the words Angel, his adversary, kept speaking slowly made more and more sense each time that he heard them. That wasn’t a good thing. The man – for lack of a better phraseology – had lured him away from Wolfram and Hart once or twice already.  
It was one of those speak-of-the-devil moments when Lindsey heard a knock on the door and opened it to reveal none other than Angel himself. By this point, Lindsey had stopped wondering how he always got through the anti-vampire detectors; they probably ought to have just gotten rid of the things entirely by now.

“What do you want?” Lindsey inquired. His voice was weary; he wasn’t ready to get dragged into another good-versus-evil fight. It was too time-consuming to even bother picking a side these days.

“I want you, Lindsey.” There was some sort of gleam in Angel’s eye that didn’t seem quite right…

And then everything went black.

***

When he woke up, the first thing he was conscious of was the metal cutting into his wrists.

“Angel?” Lindsey snapped. “What the hell? What’s going on?” He started to rattle the chains. If this was the vampire’s latest plan to scared him, well, it wasn’t going to work. Lindsey worked for the very doorstop of evil; he wasn’t going to be afraid because some idiot decided to give him an introduction to at-home bondage. “Get over here… I don’t have time for this.” He wished he would just cut to the chase. Obviously Wolfram and Hart was up to something and Angel needed to know what it was, or else puppies would die or something equally heinous. He got it.

“Wrong.” A voice floated out of the dark.

“Wrong? What? I didn’t even say anything.” Lindsey let out a hiss, like a cat that had just been stepped on or unceremoniously kicked out of its perch.

“I’m not Angel.” The figure stepped into the light, which only served to mark clearer the dark features on his face. Lindsey believed it, and all at once, he understood. 

“Angelus,” Lindsey gasped out. He wasn’t sure whether to be awed or terrified, and wasn’t sure whether it was a good or a bad thing when his brain didn’t have time to feel either one. Because long before he could reflect on the name he’d just said, or the situation he had found himself in, something so hot and burning that it felt ice cold was placed on his chest.

His chest… his chest… when had his shirt got taken off? It must have been while he slept. That had to have been it. He was open and vulnerable to the monster who had him.

Lindsey let out a low gasp, one that hurt even in his throat. It was too tight, everything was too tight, the handcuffs and the burning was too close…   
He tried to move away. It was instinct, even though he knew there was nowhere to go, nowhere to stop. 

“Please.” He should have known that would only make it worse, and now Angel… Angelus… was unbuttoning his pants too. Oh God, oh God, Lindsey thought, and he was back in Oklahoma, remembering those nights where he would have given anything just to get out. Had that been worse than this?  
There was a knife, and Angelus was sliding it down his chest.

It had hurt worse than this. He had been sure of it. The house in Oklahoma had burned every pore of him, infected every nerve ending and had refused him a moment of peace.

There would be peace here, peace now. But only at the blissful moment of unconsciousness.

Only at that moment when Angelus would let him sleep.

***

“Lindsey! Lindsey!”

Someone was shaking him hard enough to hurt. But maybe it wasn’t the shaking that hurt; everything hurt. Every nerve was on fire. How long had he been sleeping?

Someone was calling his name again and again, and he wanted to roll back over and tell whoever was calling him that whatever they needed, it could wait, because he was tired and he hurt and he didn’t want to deal with it. 

He wanted to be left alone. That was what he wanted these days, to be rich and powerful and to be left alone. Not to mention, he realized as it all came flooding back, he was most likely being woken up just so he could be tortured anew, and who wanted to wake up for that?

Lindsey let his eyes open. He was in a room; he could figure out that much. The wall of the room was blue. Had it been blue before? Maybe it was actually green, but he had been tortured so long that it now appeared blue. Maybe it was something out of 1984 – 2+2=5.

“Lindsey!” There was that voice again. He couldn’t quite focus on the voice because it felt like there was blood seeping out of his ear. That was new, too. When had that happened? What had Angelus done to his ear? Then again, he probably didn’t want to know. None of the plausible scenarios were very pretty.

Someone was shaking him again, and his neck was rattling, seemingly of its own accord. It was fascinating to Lindsey how much damage the human body could take and yet, somehow, keep on trucking. That was probably a bad thing, in retrospect. Any other broken thing would be thrown out, discarded, put out of its misery but for some reason if it was a person everyone thought that it should hang around.

Now a pair of big brown eyes was staring directly in front of his own. Lindsey jumped.

“It’s me.” The voice was so familiar. Lindsey blinked like a moth drawn to a flame because there was something in that voice that drew him in, even as he wanted to escape, even as he wanted nothing more than to flee back into dreamless sleep and to awaken later and have a plan, even if it was a bad plan. Even if his plan was to wait for death and try to find victory in the fact that it wouldn’t be a quick one. “It’s Angel.”

Lindsey’s head dipped to the side and he shut his eyes. Tumbling down the rabbit hole.

***

He was awoken to a gentle tapping of his head and the realization that he was no longer chained anywhere but lying on his side in a soft bed. Things had definitely taken a turn for the weirder, if not necessarily for the worst.

There didn’t seem to be anyone in the room right now, either. And what had that voice said right before he passed out? The words had been: “It’s Angel.” Was Angelus screwing with him again? Had it even happened at all or been the hallucinations of a dying, tortured mind? But of all the people to hope for, why in the hell would he hope for Angel?

“Help! Somebody! Anybody!” His voice was raspy and he couldn’t yell for very long. His throat felt all torn up, as if he had been chewing on broken glass. Knowing Angelus, maybe he had. Maybe that was his new thing. It would make sense, after all.

Lindsey gave up and gave a huge sigh. He didn’t like begging anyway, and was quite sure that if Angelus was listening, he was all for Lindsey begging until he didn’t have the voice to do so anymore. He figured that was at least a fair part of the point.

A beautiful brown-haired woman walked into the room. Not that Lindsey could tell she was beautiful at first, because she appeared to be no more of a splotchy blob in the eyesight that had been damaged by repeated head-bashing. Lindsey briefly wondered when that had happened. 

“It’s me, Lindsey. Cordelia,” said a voice, and that was when he started to be able to fill in the blanks. Maybe Cordelia had stolen him away from Angelus. Why would she bother? Silly little do-gooder. “Can you hear me? You’ve been hurt pretty bad.”

Lindsey laughed dryly. That much was true, for sure. If he wasn’t, he would be standing up right now and leaving, because the last thing he needed to hear was this load of crap. Probably another appeal for him to join up with the “good guys” and leave Wolfram and Hart. Not happening. Good people ended up with nothing. Sometimes bad people did, too, but good people always did. It was only fair to at least keep a few cards in his favor. Not that there seemed to be any right now. 

He raised his arm up on the mattress, realizing that his wrists were no longer shackled. There was an angry red welt on his wrists where they’d been tied, though – he must have been there a long time. 

“I guess you can hear me,” Cordelia continued. “Angel turned into Angelus for a while… which… well, as we can both see resulted in… what happened. But he’s back now. We restored his soul and now he wants you to stay here until you’re back to normal.” She crossed her arms. “Which I voted against. Normal for you is considered evil by most people’s standards.”

“Did you vote against me getting tortured, too?” Lindsey asked. His throat was so dry. He wanted water, but he had no desire to ask them for anything. “I don’t want to stay here, so I don’t care what the hell Angel wants. He can drop me on a street corner if he wants, and I’ll find my way back. But remember that this isn’t over.”

A shadow appeared behind Cordelia.

“Cordelia, could you leave us alone?”

Lindsey instinctively flinched. Hours with Angelus tended to do that to a person.

Cordelia glided off and Lindsey was left in the room with Angel, who hopefully still remained Angel and not Angelus. Otherwise he was going to have a pretty long night.

“You’re here to stay until you’re safe. Then you can go. I don’t need you here. But if I put you on that street corner like you wanted, you’ll be dead within an hour. You’re too weak to make it.”

“Is that so?” 

“Lindsey, quit being stubborn and take help when it’s offered to you.” Angel extended his hand – in it, he held a glass of water. 

Lindsey licked his lips. He did need it. He held out a hand and felt a rush of shame that his arm was shaking; must have been from the shackles before. Angelus had really stretched him out, had really gone to work on him. But he hadn’t cracked, not yet at least.

Angel put his own hand out to grip Lindsey’s wrist, to help him steady his hand as he brought the water to his lips.   
“Feel better?”

There was remorse in Angel’s eyes, but then again there always was. Lindsey got the feeling that Angel felt remorseful for everything bad that had ever happened in the world, whether he had anything to do with it or not.

“Yeah.” Lindsey didn’t have the energy to lie or fight. He wanted to get up and leave, but some part of him realized that Angel was telling him the truth. He was going to be here for the long haul.

“Try and get some sleep,” Angel told him. “You need rest. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

“Pretty soon I’ll be one of you,” Lindsey muttered. Somehow, though, there was a strange feeling coming over him now. Maybe it was just sleep, or the relief of not waiting for the next blow, but there was a softness in the sheets surrounding him that hadn’t been there before.

He wouldn’t become a good guy, he wouldn’t. Not overnight at least, and not if there wasn’t anything he could gain from it. He wouldn’t be some sucker working for nothing.

Right now, though, he was in the safest place. Maybe even the best place. It wasn’t as if pain and death couldn’t come for him here – maybe it would start here first, whether from Angelus or Wolfram and Hart – but for the first time in a long time, he felt the faintest feeling of belonging.

Maybe it would still be there in the morning. Only time would tell.


End file.
